Even as the militant group loses ground in Iraq, many Sunnis say they have no hope for peace. One family’s story shows why.

Falah sabar heard a knock at the door. It was just before midnight in western Baghdad last April and Falah was already in bed, so he sent his son Wissam to answer. Standing in the doorway was a tall young man in jeans who neither shook Wissam’s hand nor offered a greeting. “We don’t want you here,” he said. “Your family should be gone by noon tomorrow.” For weeks, Wissam, who was 23, had been expecting something like this, as he’d noticed a dark mood taking hold of the neighborhood. He went to get his father, but when they returned, the stranger was gone.

Falah is tall and broad-shouldered, with salt-and-pepper hair. At 48, he was the patriarch of a brood of sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. He sat down with Wissam to talk things through. They had been in Baghdad for just three months, but that was long enough for the abiding principle of refugee life to imprint itself on Falah’s psyche: Avoid trouble. When Wissam had managed to find a job at a construction firm, Falah had told him to be courteous, not to mix with strangers, and not to ask too many questions. If providence had granted them a new life in this unfamiliar city, it could snatch that life away just as easily.

Six months earlier, isis had seized their village, in Anbar province, the Sunni heartland of Iraq, blowing up houses and executing civilians as they fled. A few hundred families had managed to escape and were now scattered across Iraq. Many had wound up in squalid refugee camps near the front lines. The Sabars considered themselves lucky to have landed in Baghdad, a city solidly under the control of anti-isis forces.

Journalistic Freedoms ObservatoryAn Iraqi journalist faces pressure and death threats for publishing a file of corruption on investment in the province of Diyala, where local officials and directors of municipalities have manipulated in the cities of Baquba, and Khanaqin.

According to the documents obtained by the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), the journalist who was threatened with death counted to publish his article on official written data, issued by the Iraqi state institutions.

The journalist Sarmad Al-Qasim, the editorial manager of the (Lex News) agency, informed the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO) about his receiving to a direct death threats after publishing a file of corruption that includes 30 official document issued by the State of Iraq that clearly condemns those people.

The young journalist adds that his agency revealed “a group of corruptors run by a General Director of the Municipalities of the Province of Diyala, assisted by some of the districts municipality’s managers, including the mayor of Khanaqin. This group intends to block the investment in the province by placing obstacles in front of investors, and then send mediators to blackmail the investors in general, with the support of a Member of the Parliament”

The seesawing battle between Iraq’s government forces, allied militias and Islamic state militants is wrecking havoc in Fallujah. City residents are likely to be massacred if they flee, and from governments air strikes there is nowhere to hide.

Deputy Director for the Middle East at Human Rights Watch, Joe Stork, called for a cessation of violence to ensure that “aid reaches the civilian population”. Food reserves, as activists told The Diagonal, are fast shrinking, and civilians are reverting to consuming ‘soups’ made of grass. Remaining rations are near impossible for locals to purchase, sold at inflated rates. A sack of 50 kilograms of flour sold for $15 in the capital is sold for $750 in Fallujah, according to HRW. The greatest risk faces infants in the form of malnutrition – and amenorrhea for women – if the food security situation remains unchanged.

There was a time when one could speak Arabic on a flight in the United States, or even read a book written in that language, without hesitation or the fear of suffering humiliating consequences. That time is long gone. Many colleagues and friends confess that they try to avoid carrying Arabic or Persian books on flights in order not to invite suspicious looks.

On 6 April,Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, an Iraqi refugee and UC Berkeley student, was on a Southwest Airlines flight at Los Angeles international airport talking to his uncle on the phone. He was removed, interrogated and searched by the FBI as a result. Then he was forced to find another flight. Why? Because another passenger heard him speak Arabic. “Inshallah,” which means “God willing,” an expression used by all native speakers of Arabic irrespective of religious affiliation, seems to have been the trigger.​When I talk about things being better in the past, I am not being nostalgic at all. There was never a dearth of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments in this country. There were plenty and they were often translated to violent assaults against Arabs and Muslims in times of turmoil and war. The rise in violent attacks right before and during the 1991 Gulf war is just one example. However, 9/11 and the official response to it created a much more treacherous climate for Arabs and Muslims (and these two are still casually conflated) in the United States.

The 9/11 attacks were officially framed in cultural and civilizational terms, rather than as an event with a genealogy better understood in terms of geopolitics and recent history. That, of course, would have entailed a critical look at US foreign policy and the costs and consequences of alliances with brutal regimes and support for sacred wars against evil empires.

A hundred miles south, in Najaf, ayatollah Ali Sistani seethed with anger. The 86-year-old cleric, the most revered figure among Iraq’s majority Shia sect, has staked his name on Abadi establishing some form of control over the country’s political class and the powerful presence of its neighbour Iran.​Across the border, in the Iranian shrine city of Qom, the failure was also noted, though not with the same concern. For more than 13 years, Iran has been an essential stakeholder in Baghdad. But in the past three years in particular, it has had more role shaping political outcomes than many of Iraq’s most influential players.

A 2000 image of a 14-year-old soldier in Sierra Leone Photograph: Adam Butler/AP

A former senior director at a British firm says that it employed mercenaries from Sierra Leone to work in Iraq because they were cheaper than Europeans and did not check if they were former child soldiers.

James Ellery, who was a director of Aegis Defence Services between 2005 and 2015, said that contractors had a “duty” to recruit from countries such as Sierra Leone, “where there’s high unemployment and a decent workforce”, in order to reduce costs for the US presence in Iraq.

“You probably would have a better force if you recruited entirely from the Midlands of England,” Ellery, a former brigadier in the British army, told the Guardian. “But it can’t be afforded. So you go from the Midlands of England to Nepalese etc etc, Asians, and then at some point you say I’m afraid all we can afford now is Africans.” He said the company had not asked recruits if they were former child soldiers.

Aegis Defence Services, which is chaired by Sir Nicholas Soames, a Tory MP and Winston Churchill’s grandson, had a series of contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to provide guards to protect US military bases in Iraq from 2004 onwards. From 2011 the company broadened its recruitment to take in African countries, having previously employed people from the UK, the US and Nepal.

Key Take-away: Iraq Prime Minister Haidar al Abadi faces new calls for his resignation as a rump parliament of roughly 131 members, falsely claiming a quorum, has begun to ouster its sitting leaders. The rump Council of Representatives (CoR) barricaded itself in the Parliament building after an overnight sit in on April 13 to 14.

The parliamentary remnant illegally convened a session, voted amongst itself to dismiss CoR Speaker Salim al-Juburi, and elected a new provisional speaker. Party discipline and cohesion is devolving, though the Kurdistan Alliance, ISCI, and Badr Organization – each of which has received benefits in the evolving cabinet reshuffle – appear to have retained control of their members.

Senior political leaders are meeting. Longtime allies Ammar al-Hakim and Jalal Talabani met in Suleimaniyah on April 13, presumably to discuss ISCI cooperation with the Kurdish Alliance, while rumors state that Muqtada Sadr is in Lebanon, as is Jawad al-Sharistani, the son-in-law and representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

​Although these leaders may be trying to stave off government collapse, they may not be able to overcome the parliamentary entropy. Street protests have reignited in advance of Friday prayers. Parliamentary means, protests, or force may topple the current government.

A terrorist hoping to buy an antiaircraft weapon in recent years needed to look no further than Facebook, which has been hosting sprawling online arms bazaars, offering weapons ranging from handguns and grenades to heavy machine guns and guided missiles.​The Facebook posts suggest evidence of large-scale efforts to sell military weapons coveted by terrorists and militants. The weapons include many distributed by the United States to security forces and their proxies in the Middle East. These online bazaars, which violate Facebook’s recent ban on the private sales of weapons, have been appearing in regions where the Islamic State has its strongest presence.

This week, after The New York Times provided Facebook with seven examples of suspicious groups, the company shut down six of them.

The findings were based on a study by the private consultancy Armament Research Services about arms trafficking on social media in Libya, along with reporting by The Times on similar trafficking in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.